The Sage School of Philosophy and the _Philosophical Review_ are pleased to announce a Workshop organized around J. Robert G. Williamss Eligibility and Inscrutability, the winner of the 2006 Young Philosophers Essay Competition prize. This year the competition was in philosophy of language fifty-five submissions were reviewed. The final version of the paper will be published in the _Philosophical Review_. Everyone interested is welcome to attend.
Location: Lincoln Hall, Room B-21, Saturday, April 22, 10:00 am 1:30 pm
Program
9:45 Slow gathering (coffee, bagels, etc. available)
10:00 Robert Williams (University of Leeds): Synopsis of Eligibility and Inscrutability
10:20 Timothy Bays (Notre Dame University): Comments
11:00 Short break
11:05 John Hawthorne (Rutgers University): Comments
11:45 Long break (coffee, bagels, etc. once again)
12:00 Robert Williams (Leeds University): Responses
12:20 General discussion
1:30 Slow dispersing
Abstract of Eligibility and Inscrutability
Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis eligibility response: some theories are better than others, not because the fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are (1) to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but instead flows naturally from three independently motivated elements; and (2) to show that severe limitations afflict the proposal. In conclusion, I pick out the element of the eligibility response that is responsible for the limitations: future work in this area should therefore concentrate on amending this aspect of the overall theory.